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Food and Drink
FOOD & DRINK The ordinary Roman was not a great eater of meat. The army diet was a balanced one of wheat (which the soldiers themselves ground and made into porridge, bread, or biscuits), some meat (usually bacon), fish, poultry, cheese, vegetables, fruit, salt, olive oil, and raw wine. Officers did rather better. At home, porridge and bread were the staple food of most Romans, many of whom in the city had to rely on the corn dole for their needs. In more well-to-do homes, jentaculum (breakfast), for those who wanted it, might be bread dipped in wine, or with cheese, dried fruits, or honey. The equivalent of lunch was prandium, again a light meal, often consisting of left-overs from the previous day. The main meal of the day, cena, was eaten in the middle of the afternoon, after work and the bath, and could, and often did, go on for hours. Dinner-parties were elaborate, and could be dignified or disgusting affairs, depending on the discrimination of the host and his choice of guests. Overindulgence was the rule rather than the exception. Dinner guests reclined on their left elbow at an angle of about 45 degrees to the table, on couches set against three sides of it, and ate with their fingers. The meal consisted of three parts, within each of which there could be any number of courses served individually or together. Hors d’oeuvre might be eggs presented in a variety of ways, salads, cooked vegetables, shellfish, snails, and, occasionally, roast stuffed dormice. The main courses illustrate the varieties of meat, game, fish, and fowl that were available, or which were pressed into service in the form of exotic-sounding dishes: not just beef, lamb, pork, venison, hare, bream, hake, mackerel, mullet, oysters, sole, chicken, duck, goose, and partridge, but also veal, sucking-pig, boar, wild goat, kid, porpoise, crane, flamingo, ostrich, thrush, and turtle-dove. Most main dishes were served in sauce, the basic ingredient of which was a factory-made fish concoction called liquamen. The meal would finish with dessert: fruit, cakes, and puddings. Juvenal provides a hypothetical guest with a simpler country meal: home-grown asparagus and farm eggs as starters; chicken and milk-fed kid for the main course; local pears, oranges, grapes, and apples to finish with. Martial describes the menu for a dinner-party for seven that he gave in the country. * Hors d’oeuvre: mallow leaves, lettuce, chopped leeks, mint, rocket, mackerel garnished with rue and sliced egg, sow’s udder marinated in tuna-fish brine. * Main course, all served together: tender cuts of lamb with beans and spring greens, and a chicken and a ham left over from previous dinners. * Dessert: fresh fruit, washed down with vintage wine from Nomentum. Wine was the national, and natural, drink, usually diluted with water: beer was for Britons and Gauls. Wine was also mixed with honey to make mulsum, a cooling aperitif which accompanied the first course at dinner. The best wine-producing region in Italy was around the border between Latium and Campania, from which came the excellent Caecuban, Setian, Falernian, and Massic vintages. A list of Food/Drink TYPES OF BREAD Bread varied in quality depending on the flour, which varied with the kind of grain, the setting of the millstones and the fineness of the sieves. The very best bread was made from wheat flour; the very worst from bran alone. Loaves were circular and somewhat flat, like a coffee cake COMMON FRUITS |} COMMON VEGETABLES |} COMMON DRINKS |} COMMON MEAT AND FISH |} SAUCES/SPICES |} Silphium (acquired through trade) Silphium was a member of the fennel family that grew on the shores of Cyrenaica (in present-day Libya). It was so important to the Cyrenean economy that it graced that ancient city’s coins. Silphium had a host of uses in cooking and in medicine, and Pliny the Elder recorded the herb’s use as a contraceptive. It was reportedly effective for contraception when taken once a month as a tincture. It could also be used as emergency birth control, either orally or vaginally, as an abortifacient.